Ethel Sara Wolper is a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic world. She earned her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Islamic Art from the University of California in Los Angeles. At UNH, Wolper teaches courses on the history of Islam and the Middle East, Sufism, Cities in crisis, Islam in America, and Islamic Art. Wolper has held fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the American Association of University Women, the Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery of Art, the Mellon Foundation at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and the National Humanities Center. At UNH, she served as director of the UNH in London program. Wolper is the author of Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia (Penn State University Press, 2003), and an editor with Daphna Ephrat and Paulo Pinto of Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes: Emplacements of Spiritual Power across Time and Space (Brill, 2021) She has published articles in Muqarnas, Mesegios, Muslim World, and Medieval Encounters. She has contributed chapters and entries to The Art Museum (Phaidon, 2010), Women in Islamic Culture, and the Readers Guide to Gay and Lesbian Studies. Wolper's current research focuses on the politics of heritage conservation in destroyed cities of the Islamic world. She is the lead on the remembering Mosul project (www.rememberingmosul.org).
